Hummingbirds

Have seen some really good photographs of Hummingbirds taken by my classmates in the last few days.

That reminded me of my chance encounter with a pair of Hummingbirds at one of those picnic tables on top of a vista point at Palm Springs last year.

Now that yours truly has Photoshop, found that picture and edited it to my hearts content..

Here is my contribution to the Hummingbird collection.

It is a pity that we cut down the honeysuckle plant in our backyard as part of the construction. Need to go buy one and plant it just to get the birds to visit our house again...

or at least put a feeder in the backyard!


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A little cheer

Have not had this kind of allergies in the last ten years. Slept through the entire day. Came out feeling a lot better.

The kids came home and saw my screensaver, which had the Tulips.

Me : Do you guys like it?

Little One : Not really!

Jr. : Not really!

Me : Why? I thought it is a great shot!

Jr.: The storm clouds in the back are scary.

Me : It was taken near Seattle and it was raining when we went there. You can see the water drops on all the tulips, can't you?

LO : Now that you have photoshop, can't you make the sky brighter or something?


Me : LOL! Sure we can. Was using Photoshop to get the features in the clouds out. Now I will go remove the features and make it brighter for you..

So, the first thing after they went to bed..

Old Photo..

New Photo..

Think Seattle could use a perpetual Cloud brightening plugin on Photoshop, at least for kids who are born and raised here in Silicon Valley!


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Pu'ahi crater

Before..

After edits

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Waterfalls

Another shot with the clouds coming out and the water showing all the detail..

Before PS

After PS

Portraits are not so easy to adjust unless the original lighting setup was perfect. Having a busy week with a stomach bug, a conference and an irritated family thanks to the little one refusing food...

Portraits will have to wait till the weekend!

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More from the tide pools..

Double processed to bring out the glow!


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Progression..

First two days of playing with Landscapes... clouds, sky, mountains, water etc..

Then on the way to preparing for Portraits a brief stop with some flora and fauna.

Presenting, the dragonfly!

Feedback to improve these photos are welcome.

Have now learned to write "actions" which are Photoshop Macros and the process is definitely speeding up.


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If you are convinced..

Here is where you start..

Will write a detailed post with a little Primer of sorts on the Double Processing RAW Image editing to get both sky and foreground to have details.

Short summary :

1- Shoot in RAW format instead of JPG. Here is the gotcha. When you do this and shoot in RAW, the instant display on your camera will look great but when you download the pictures at home it will not look that great.. Why? because the instant picture on your viewfinder is a JPG done by the Camera's default software to accentuate color tones and sharpness using a set of built in corrections for that sensor!

That means you have to work (hard) to make the RAW image look exactly like it did to your eyes after downloading the picture by modifying it after download to get your own JPG!

2- remember what the actual place looked like. that helps get the correct colors

3- get adobe Photoshop CS5. A friend who works there got it for me for a great discount.

(That means step 2.5 - get a friend who works at Adobe?!)

4- There is a book/video by Scott Kelby called 7-Point System for Camera Raw which goes through a lot of detail on basic editing with Camera RAW. It is a non destructive way to play with the photograph where you can test things. (Yes.. Yes.. I know.. We can save the image as a copy and keep doing Undo and that is non destructive as well, but that is way too time consuming. You will know what I am talking about when you do the edits)

5- Learn this technique called Double Processing where you make two copies of your image.

- in one image focus on the sky (ie, bring out details in the washed out over exposed areas of the original image

- in the second copy ignore the sky (it will practically be white) and instead bring out details in the foreground

- composite the two images by selectively replacing the sky in the washed out white region with the sky from the first copy

It took me a few hours to practice, but it works very well. Have not seen any free tutorials on this that are as good as the one in the DVD which by the way seems to be expensive as well at 69.99 and again step 2.5 helps!

Will do a short screen shot by screen shot primer over the next few weeks to describe this process!

In the mean time we have to appreciate the human eye for its amazing ability to see these scenes in their entire contrast range instantly and the image processor in our brain that can do all this instantaneously.


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Before and After..

Before..

(actual shot from Hawaii trip converted from CR2 to JPG - linked in original post)

After..

Every detail shown in picture was actually there in the original photo, just not visible. When I took the picture remember the sky being so amazing and felt that I had done something wrong after downloading the pictures. Now realize what was wrong. This changes my strategy for taking pictures as well. At the risk of not getting a bright photo, going to go for a slightly over exposed image which captures details in the dark or better still start taking bracketed photos as a default when going for landscapes!

Now it takes me 15 minutes to fix pictures where clouds and rocks had no detail.

Next step, learn how to fix portraits of the kids and my VC.. aka Sangeetha!

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